Canucks have become a perfect fit for Chris Higgins and Maxim Lapierre

Vancouver Canucks are a perfect fit for Chris Higgins and Maxim Lapierre

VANCOUVER — If you believed everything that comes out of an NHL locker-room, you’d be convinced every team promotes a winning culture and every team is comprised of character players who exude only the most positive energy and confidence.

But, if that were really the case, 30 teams would make the playoffs every year and 30 teams would make a deep playoff run. There’s a reason some of those teams are in 12th place, just as there’s a reason some teams are battling for first overall and it isn’t chance.

This brings us around to the Vancouver Canucks, but instead of pontificating about their many glorious qualities, we refer you to two examples.

The first is Chris Higgins.

The second is Max Lapierre.

Higgins and Lapierre are currently key contributors on a team that is vying for the Presidents’ Trophy, but when they arrived in Vancouver at last year’s trade deadline, their career arcs — how shall we say? — weren’t at their absolute apex.

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Higgins was joining his fifth team in two seasons and trying to outrun a party-boy image he built in Montreal. Lapierre was joining his third team of the season and was viewed as something of a sideshow around the league.

But, despite their checkered resumes, both players have slid seamlessly into the Canucks’ fabric and are now indispensable parts of a legitimate Stanley Cup contender. Higgins has been the Canucks’ most consistent forward this season. Lapierre has played a vital role in the bottom half of the forward rotation and demonstrated a deft scoring touch since moving on to a line with Henrik Sedin.

For the organization, both players represent found money and you might write it off to luck. But there’s also something about the culture the Canucks that has allowed Higgins, Lapierre and others to find themselves when they looked lost.

“Last year when I came here I wasn’t feeling very good about myself and my game,” Lapierre said. “But I felt right at home after two days. You feel like they’re doing everything to make you better. ”

“Maybe some teams don’t know how to win,” says Higgins. “This team knows how to win and you see it in the way guys carry themselves.”

What that means, of course, is open to interpretation, but if you were to analyze the chemistry in the Canucks’ room, you’d come up with a couple of things.

The leadership group, for starters, has been in place for the last five years and enjoyed considerable success together. They’ve also grown accustomed to playing under the intense scrutiny of a Canadian market without being distracted, as Higgins puts it, by the “three million GMs on Twitter who tell you what to change after every game.”

As it happens, the Canucks’ best players are also their hardest workers, which creates a powerful peer pressure. Most of those players signed for under market value, creating what management terms a “covenant.”

The organization, for its part, pours resources into the team in the form of everything from chefs to sleep doctors to sensory deprivation rooms. The significance of that commitment is not lost on the players.

“Our way to say thank you is to perform well,” Lapierre said.

“When you come in here you see the (Sedin) twins and all our leaders working hard every day,” said defenceman Keith Ballard, who had stops in Florida and Phoenix before Vancouver. “That’s one of the first things I noticed. There’s a workout every day and everybody does it. Nobody complains. Even if it’s the middle of February they still put the work in.

“It’s the environment that makes you want to get better every day.”

Higgins and Lapierre have found their place in that environment. Both players, to be sure, had success earlier in their careers and they deserve most of the credit for reclaiming that success.

But they also arrived in the right place at the right time. The Canucks needed help up front, but they didn’t need anyone to be Howie Morenz. Both players were allowed to slide into the lineup without a great deal of pressure. Both players were also smart enough to identify their roles and understand how to best fill them.

Maybe it helped that they’d been humbled by the game and were ready for what the organization offered. It’s hard to say.

What’s clear, however, is they’ve made the Canucks a better team.

“I don’t think (Higgins and Lapierre) came to Vancouver and a magic wand was waived,” says Ballard. “They’re both guys who came in and worked hard and they fit in.”